Suha and Zeinab revisited

I woke up in the middle of the night and switched on the radio, just in time to catch a familiar voice saying “Suha Arafat”. It was, of course Zeinab Badawi, and I was wondering if this was another case of deja vu all over again; was I hearing the same episode of HardTalk that I’d blogged a while ago? Was it a figment of my imagination, or was it one of those dreams that are so close to reality that you’re wondering, in the dream, if it’s really a dream?

It was “another chance to hear” Suha and Zeinab, for no apparent reason other than, perhaps, to reignite the vexing question of Yassir’s assassination. 

The audio version gives quite a different impression from the full-on technicolor version. No portrait of Yasser leering down from his easel to distract one - no time to ponder over Suha’s flawless make up (has she got a lady-in-waiting or does she do it herself?)

There’s just the conversation. No frills. Because I missed the start of the introduction I wasn’t quite sure if I was hearing an updated version, or whether this was an unadulterated repeat of the January interview.

Suha was still convinced that old Yasser had ingested a dose of polonium in his frugal lunch -  just a little fish or chicken don’t you know -  because he was in fine fettle up to that fatal day. “My husband  was a fitness fanatic”, she said - good diet, abstemious, and the picture of health. We’ll have to take her word for it. He didn’t have aids after all.

Suha was insistent that someone - it must have been a traitorous Palestinian - had slipped the poison into his healthy lunch on behalf of the Israelis.

Healthy diet

I was certain I’d heard that the poisoning theory had been definitively debunked by the French, Swiss and Russian investigators, but at the time of the interview, Suha hadn’t received those disappointing results, and she wouldn’t have liked them very much when she did receive them.  

She’ll be appealing the findings. I don’t know if this is ongoing.

Now that I was able to properly listen, I realised that Suha was saying that old Yasser, the father of the Palestinians -  specifically the father of every single Palestinian child - wanted to establish a secular state.  Confusingly, he had made Suha convert from Christianity to Islam when they were married, secular old rogue that he was. 

 The only aspect of religiosity that concerned her  greatly was the unthinkable prospect of Jews being allowed to pray at the Temple Mount. She thought the very idea was beyond the pale. She got so worked up at the whole idea of Jews praying at the Temple Mount that Zeinab had to calm her down,. ”The Israeli government assures us that it’s not going to happen.” said Zeinab in a calm voice. 

The bit about the money was as dramatic as ever. “Where is it?” asked Zeinab. “Where are Yasser’s millions?” I remembered the gestures with which Zeinab accompanied that question, looking round the room exaggeratedly, as if for a giant safe or a mound of ingots.   

I wonder why the BBC World Service thought it was a good idea to resurrect this peculiar interview, specially since with hindsight the poisoning claim looks so ‘conspiracy theory’.

Why on earth did they do it?

Can we forgive Zeinab Badawi?

I happened to see HardTalk yesterday - the episode with Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack, a Hungarian born Jew who now lives in London, and Zeinab Badawi.

Zeinab, as we know, is inclined to wear her heart on her sleeve in terms of Hardtalk. She gave Mosab Hassan Yousef, the eldest son of a founder of the militant Palestinian movement Hamas a very hard time, and suggested he was a traitor to his father and the Hamas terrorist organisation.  

On the other hand, she gave Suha Arafat an easy ride. Her most penetrating questions concerned money matters, and she appeared easily satisfied with Suha’s evasive responses.

We are aware that the BBC has a severe case of cognitive dissonance when it comes to the Jewish peoples. On the one hand they disapprove of Israel, are opposed to Zionism and sympathetic to the Palestinian version of the Israel/Palestine conflict, but on the other they have an almost mawkish curiosity about the Holocaust and love filming the personal stories of survivors, especially if recounted in great detail.  

All that aside, I was pleasantly surprised that Zeinab drew out harrowing information from Mrs Pollack respectfully and gently in an interested, almost warm manner. I didn’t know she had it in her, as they say.  The only dissonance was at the end, where either the BBC or Zeinab chose to impose a jarring agenda about forgiveness.

I realise that many righteous people consider forgiveness a virtue. Something to aspire to, even under the most appalling and difficult circumstances. Remember Gordon Wilson who forgave his daughter’s killers after the Enniskillen bombing? Forgiveness is supposed to be cathartic, like throwing off a cloak of darkness.

   "To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you." - Louis B. Smedes

Perhaps it was with that in mind that the BBC decided to frame, in a rather negative light, Susan Pollack’s inability to forgive the Nazis on behalf of the millions they murdered. 

This is the blurb on the HardTalk website:

Zeinab Badawi talks to British Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack, who lost fifty members of her family, including her parents, in Nazi camps. She recently gave evidence at the trial in Germany of former SS guard Oskar Gröning, who has been charged with complicity in the murder of 300,000 Jews. She says she cannot forgive him and welcomes the trial. What purpose can it serve today?

Recently Susan Pollack spoke at the trial of former SS guard Oskar Gröning, but unlike Eva Kor, did not embrace the 93 year-old former death camp clerk.

Eva Kor said: 

‘I wanted to thank him for having some human decency in accepting responsibility for what he has done.‘The victims, 70 years after liberation, with 300 others, they were all talking about their experience, falling apart – “poor me… what have they done to me?”‘I don’t forget what they have done to me. But I am not a poor person – I am a victorious woman who has been able to rise above the pain and forgive the Nazis.’

Allegedly other victims have said they see Eva Kor as a traitor, a sentiment the press seems to view with disapproval. All I can say is, who are they to judge? If that seems ambiguous - to clarify - I’m addressing the press, and for that matter, everyone else as well. Including me. 

Neither Eva Kor nor Susan Pollack sought revenge in the form of imprisonment for Gröning, and both campaigned for enlightenment, awareness and vigilance against antisemitism and racism in any form. 

Eva Kor’s response, like Gordon Wilson’s, was remarkable, but Susan Pollack was not self-pitying and at no point did she come across as saying anything resembling “poor me..”. She was an articulate, intelligent and extraordinarily un-bitter, philosophical person, in my humble opinion.

If Zeinab Badawi has a softer side, and is willing to let us see more of it, bring it on!

Carefully made up

Should you take the sincerity of the spoken word for granted when you see or hear it on the media? Some might think, cynically, that what we get is more a matter of what the spokesperson has decided to say today.

That thought persisted when I watched the HardTalk with Zeinab Badawi and Suha Arafat. (H/T BBCWatch. Congratulations to Hadar Sela on a very well deserved accolade.)

HardTalk.

You know that expression ‘rats fighting in a sack’? Something like that popped into my head.  

Zeinab and Suha. Two harpies play-fighting on the BBC.

Everyone who’s aware of Zeinab’s interviewing history would be pretty naïve to expect any kind of penetrating grilling from Zeinab, a least in the case of an Arafat.  In the event, apart from the usual propagandistic cliches that Suha knew she could get away with, it was Zeinab who came across as equally, if not more, ‘partial’ than the (relatively) poor widow. 

Some of this interview was hilarious, some plain weird.  Hadar noted Suha’s evasive answers and picked out the most fanciful of the propagandistic allusions she slipped in, more of which later, but what about Zeinab’s performance?

Zeinab asks Suha “when you’re living in Malta in relative comfort and you see the struggling  of the Palestinian people....how does that make you feel?”

Well, Suha feels terrible, but she and her daughter wouldn’t be safe in ‘Palestine’.  “The name Arafat.. it’s not easy.” Fair enough. I can quite believe they’d be a sitting target,  even more so now that the Islamic State terror group has managed to set up bases of power in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The section one could call “Where’s the money?” was strange as strange could be. Zeinab mentioned eleven million dollars that were supposed to be in bank accounts “under your control - where is it? 

“Where is the money?” 

At that, Zeinab looked around with a theatrical gesture, meaning .... what? I don’t quite know. Did she mean the spartan fixtures and fittings? As in “I see no outward signs of wealth here?” Can’t be that.

Perhaps she meant the opposite. The ‘relatively comfortable' surroundings. Maybe she was alluding to the considerable sum Suha has very likely thrown at cosmetic dentistry and personal grooming. (Nice eyebrows, by the way.)

Well, “this is character assassination - not against me - against my husband.” Suha did look, momentarily, a little shifty.

I must digress a minute. You know how the BBC crew will ‘stage’ these films? (well, they do) They’re inclined to fiddle with elaborate lighting contraptions and turn off any humming fridges. They spend time artfully placing the subject before a suitable background. 

I just thought it was hilarious that a huge portrait of Yasser must have been wheeled in on a whacking great artists easel so he could leer down on the proceedings throughout the interview.  I wonder if they brought the easel with, as a prop? Perhaps Suha is a painter.

(Something about the Arafat countenance belies Suha’s insistence that her husband was a fitness fanatic before being poisoned with polonium. Yasser Arafat the health freak. Hmm.)

However, when it comes to the nitty gritty, it wasn’t clear who Suha fears most or regards as the greatest enemy, Hamas or Israel. 

She said, or has decided to say, that she and Yasser hadn’t put all that effort, suffering and struggle “all our life” for Palestine to become an Islamic state. But “it should have Muslim law” “We want the Muslim laws, but not the Muslim state.”

So what’s the actual difference? I must say this seemed confusing, and if Zeinab had her wits about her she might have insisted on clarification.

Suha also said what happened in France was terrible, a crime, and France opened its arms to immigrants who should have been appreciative of the Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité they were lucky enough to experience in France

Zeinab turned to the subject of Yehuda Glick who had also been a guest on a recent HardTalk, and mentioned the ‘religious dimension’ to the problem. Suha then adamantly  defended the Muslims. “It’s not the time to provoke the Muslims.” 

Suha keeps saying: “This is not a religious...it’s a nationalist cause”  Well if Mr and Mrs Arafat sincerely ever thought it was simply a nationalist cause, it sure ain’t now. Of course in truth, the whole basis of the Arabs’ rejectionism is religiously based. It is and always was a religious cause. 

 Regarding Hamas’s aspiration -  the extermination of Israel:

 “You’ve also said recently that the armed struggle is no longer plausible. When you look at your husband’s legacy, with the olive branch in one hand and the gun in the other, do you believe that he was wrong, then, to believe that there could be an armed struggle that would bring results” 

Suha decided to say,  “In the beginning Yasser Arafat agreed that there would be an armed struggle” History, not me,  will judge him, she declared.

She seemed to be saying that Hamas is making the people pay too high a price. She said: “Why did they not build shelters instead of tunnels?”

“Should now the armed struggle recognise Israel?” Asked Zeinab, with an inscrutable expression. Is Zeinab for or against?

“Listen. Come on! They have to recognise Israel” replied Suha. “They have to recognise Israel because there’s no other way. Don’t tell me they are going to banish Israel from the river to the sea.”

It all seems a bit vague. A little bit woo and a little bit waay; a bit dodgy.

So what does Suha really think? 

A few days ago, Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement posted the above picture to their official Facebook page. It demonstrates that the movement still favors violence as the way to obtain statehood. 
A stone, a knife, a Molotov cocktail, a gun, a hand grenade, an assault rifle and an RPG illustrate Fatah's progress in terms of more and more sophisticated weapons. These are the means with which it works toward its goal - to "finish with a state," as the poster states: "We started with stones .... and we will finish with a stateThe Palestinian National Liberation Movement [Fatah]"[Facebook, "Fatah - The Main Page", Jan. 18, 2015]
For years, the Palestinian Authority and Fatah have promoted violence. Palestinian Media Watch has documented numerous statements emphasizing their adherence to "armed struggle" and veneration for the rifle. This week's stabbing attack in Tel Aviv was encouraged by such promotion of violence by the PA and Fatah who have both explicitly encouraged attacking Jews and Israelis with knives.

Does she not know about this? Perhaps she doesn’t do Facebook.

Hadar had treated us to a comprehensive list of Suha’s propagandist nuggets:

“When there’s a rocket on Israel we have 1,000 people who are killed in the same day.”“Gaza…the most crowded city in the world…”“…more than 1,000 people who are still in the coma…” [after the conflict last summer]“….nothing happen [with the peace process] because Israel continue to do settlements, Israel continue to build the wall….”

as well as some of Zeinab’s, including the reference to “some progress being made on the diplomatic scene”, meaning Mahmoud Abbas’s ICC manoeuvre. Progress on the diplomatic scene? What an odd way of putting it, for an impartial BBC employee I mean.

Finally this brings me to Zeinab’s pronunciation. Like Yolande Knell, she’s gone native on “Ramallah”. Rumul-lah!

I thought this carefully made-up Suha came across as much more reasonable than the Suha who made hysterical claims about Israel poisoning the old rogue. Perhaps everything she said was as carefully made up as her face. She wasn’t wearing her mad hat for HardTalk, and Zeinab seemed disappointed. No doubt she would have preferred to play the voice of reason against widow Arafat’s histrionic anti-Zionism. Instead Zeinab took the role of part sycophant, part interlocutor and part fellow anti-Zionist, slightly deflated at her failure to coax as much virulence from her subject as she’d hoped.    As Hadar said, a puff piece.

Today

6th August.

Our “BBC is biased” community is to get some competition. From the Respect party. (H/T Deegee) 

The first half of their statement reads like something we might have said ourselves, here at “Is”:

“George Galloway has announced that he will establish his own public enquiry into the BBC’s role in reporting the events of the past few weeks in Gaza.    The Bradford West MP had previously announced that he is refusing to pay his licence fee until the BBC demonstrated a more impartial standard of broadcasting on the conflict. Galloway has been openly critical of the its editorial standpoint on the conflict, arguing that the BBC has a duty, as a publicly funded organisation, to adopt an unbiased approach to such major stories.”

We even agreed with him about the BBC’s abysmal failure to report the demonstration outside the BBC’s premises, but for slightly different reasons.

    “Many in the country were outraged when the BBC failed to report on the July 19th national demonstration which had been attended by tens of thousands of demonstrators. It belatedly addressed this with a hastily-arranged piece on its website, for which it had to borrow an image from a rival broadcaster. It has also been commented that since the outcry, the BBC’s reporting had apparently become more balanced.”

“This was in part down to the reporting of Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen from the front-line in Gaza. Strangely – indeed, inexplicably – Bowen is absent from the reporting this week as he is, according to Twitter, ‘on holiday’.”

Here’s where we diverge. I really don’t think the BBC would dare ‘sequester’ Jeremy Bowen - what about the all-powerful Zionist Lobby that they claim to be so terrified of? I do love the sagacious use of scare-quotes though. 

“ The BBC has been dogged by scandals in the past year and has faced questioning on its integrity, from the child abuse scandal to questions about executive pay-offs, with licence fee payers increasingly turning their backs on the institution in favour of other media outlets.    We will keep you up to date with the developments on the public enquiry. If you can help in any way with the enquiry, please email gallowayg@parliament.uk

A glimmer of light peeped through the fog last night when Douglas Murray was given a little bit of the BBC’s precious Israel-bashing time to debate with Ming Campbell.

First we saw Baroness W. stating her case. " Morally indefensible. On a point of principle. Norrin our interest. Resign.” 

Bye then.

Why did David Cameron take such an uncritical approach to Israel during the last few weeks, risking Warsi’s  fury? wondered Mark Urban.

Because he was clinging on to the last vestiges of reason before she made it well nigh impossible to do so? (Not that a PM with a backbone would have caved in) 

Clegg was shown calling for  Israel’s capitulation. “Vince agrees. Disproportionate. War crimes.”

“Disproportionate” screeched Ming over and over again. “Stop helping Israel defend itself” he pleaded. “International criminal court!”

Why doesn’t a senior Lib Dem resign? wondered  Kirsty Wark, wearing an alarmingly distracting jumper. (acid green, with  flounced and scalloped black lace cut-outs, since you ask) 

She allowed Douglas a few minutes to dispense the common sense for which he’s well known and deservedly respected. 

Suddenly Kirsty decided to cut him off in that rude, disrespectful manner they reserve for people who criticise Hamas, for that is exactly what he started to do. At which point Kirsty’s face clouded and he was toast. 

ON the bright side, wharrabout that  HardTalk with Zeinab Badawi and John Kerry? Badawi seemed uncharacteristically mellow. For once she  appeared over awed.   

Kerry was unequivocally supportive of Israel. Over to you Pat.